Dr. Monica A. Hershberger joined the Department of Music at Lehigh University in 2023. A musicologist specializing in the history of opera in the United States, she is committed to examining the intersections of music and power. Her work has been recognized by the National Opera Association, funded by the Society for American Music, quoted in the New York Times, and published in journals such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of the Society for American Music. In her first book, Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes (University of Rochester Press, 2023), Hershberger identifies and amplifies the rustlings of modern feminism in mid-twentieth century American operas. Beginning with philosopher Catherine Clément’s notion of the opera stage as a place where “women perpetually sing their undoing,” Hershberger shows how male composers and librettists working in the United States in the 1950s sought to build a national repertory of opera by replicating some of the punishing patterns of the European opera canon. She examines four operas (The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden) tightly wedded to the age-old paradigm of the virgin or the whore, and she shows how sopranos like Phyllis Curtin and Beverly Sills worked to “undo” that paradigm, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. Hershberger is currently at work on her next book, examining the life and legacy of soprano Dorothy Maynor (1910-1996).Hershberger earned her Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University in 2017. Before shifting to musicology, she earned degrees in piano performance from Bowling Green State University and Michigan State University.